Edited by Ben Saunders, English professor; director, Comics and Cartoon Studies Minor

The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents the origin stories, seminal tales, and characters of the Marvel Universe to explore Marvel’s transformative and timeless influence on an entire genre of fantasy. Throughout the 1960s, the Fantastic Four doubled as the flagship title and the creative laboratory of the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced dozens of new characters and concepts in its pages, while expanding the emotional bandwidth and visual vocabulary of the Super Hero genre with every issue. This collection gathers some key tales from Lee and Kirby’s lengthy tenure—from their first experiments in generic hybridity to the remarkable fusion of the cosmic and the quotidian that is the “The Galactus Trilogy.”

Penguin Random House, 2023